Don’t Not Bid on Keywords You Don’t Want
Posted on December 14, 2008
Filed Under adwords | Comments
Yes, that double negative in the title of this post is confusing, so let me explain.
One of the biggest challenges any Adwords advertiser faces is controlling how Google serves ads against queries. Google gives us four match types (broad, phrase, exact and negative) to control the ad serving. It’s broad match which is the most difficult and perhaps the least understood.
Imagine you’re bidding on the keywords cheap hotels and london hotels, both on broad match. Google will be triggering those keywords against all sorts of queries.
Say that cheap hotels isn’t working for you, so you decide to pause or delete it. Sensible thing to do, right? Wrong. All Google does in that case is trigger london hotels against all the queries that it used to trigger cheap hotels against. Nothing has changed.
To remedy this, follow these steps:
- Regularly check the search query report in Adwords, and/or referrer reports from your web logs or tracking.
- Take control of the serving. If broad match keywords are being triggered by lots of different queries, add those queries as exact matches.
- Test your new exact matches. Keep the keywords that work, but do not delete the ones that don’t. Either bid them down to £0.01 or change them to negative match; the result is the same.
- Repeat the above process.
I’ve seen this error time and time again when looking at clients’ campaigns for the first time. Google is making a fortune from it.
Agree or disagree with this post, or have something interesting to add? Then leave a comment below!
Related posts
Technorati Tags
adwords, broad match, google, match types, search queriesComments to “Don’t Not Bid on Keywords You Don’t Want”
-
StuBryce
-
mediaczar (Mat Morrison)